Description

The Confederation have been at war with the Kilrathi for the past 20 years, and you're just now joining the Vega campaign. You're a 2nd Lieutenant just out of the Academy, with some good work under your belt. You're posted to Tiger's Claw, the flagship of the Confederation Fleet. Will you help the Confederation to victory, or go down in infamy?

Wing Commander is a space combat simulator interspersed with shipboard dialogs. Onboard the ship, you can save/load game, visit the bar to get the latest gossip, or go on to the next mission briefing, and the 3D space combat part.

The 3D space combat has you sitting in the cockpit, where you control the craft like roll, turn, up/down, afterburner, as well as fire guns and launch missiles. There are four different crafts on the Confed side, each with different flight characteristics and armament. You will have a wingman on each mission, and you should keep the wingman alive as the wingman will help you if you issue the right orders. You can also taunt the enemy. You'll be fighting several different types of enemy fighters and capital ships, and even combat a few Kilrathi aces.

When the mission is complete, land back onboard the ship and get ready for the next one. The campaign tree have both winning and losing paths.

Trivia

Amiga version

The standard Amiga version of Wing Commander has only 16 colors, as it was released just before the Amiga 1200 which added the 256-color AGA version. Some early demos were made in 32 colors, but the number of colors had to be reduced as the game was too slow on not accelerated Amigas. The only 256-color version is the one bundled with the CD32 system, which also runs on A1200s with CD drives.

Auto pilot

Due to the way the game has you auto-piloting to different nav points where the action takes place, most gamers would think that the engine simply has a generic "endless" space and it simply spawns the required objects when you use the autopilot feature. In reality the game actually generates the entire area you see on your nav computer with all its objects. This can be seen when actually flying to each of the nav points manually.

Campaign

Wing Commander features a full "winning" and "losing" branches of a campaign tree, with some "neither" branches where you can turn yourself around. Unfortunately, most players simply replay each mission until they win (or else they eject and reload the old savegame), thus NEVER experiencing the "losing" side of the campaign, thus wasting all the effort put in by Origin. Origin simplified the campaign flowchart in all later games (and the mission packs) so that they no longer need completely separate campaign paths for the "losing" branch, to save on development costs.

Copy protection

The original package came with blueprints for the 4 Confed fighters in the game: Hornet, Scimitar, Raptor, and Rapier. The copy protection ask you questions from those blueprints.

Cutscenes

Most of the major cutscenes are random in themselves (e.g. every time the briefing starts people sit down and stand up in different order).

Development

This game was almost canceled the quarter before it shipped. The sales & marketing director Marten Davies at Origin did not believe it would sell. In an interview with the German magazine GameStar (issue 05/2016), Roberts refutes this claim and replaces it with a different anecdote: Roberts believed the game would sell 100.000 units, Davies calculated with at least 200.000 units. So Roberts did bet his car (Porsche 944 Turbo) on it - and lost because the game sold 250.000 units in a short time frame. However, with the royalties he could easily afford a new car of the same model...

Maniac

When you fly a mission with "Maniac", there's the name "Joker" written on his helmet, however if you fly with the other pilots, the right name is on their helmets. Probably Origin changed this before the final release. At least this happens when you play the original Wing Commander Missions with the sm2.exe from Secret Missions 2: Crusade.

Manual

The game manual, like other Origin games, is written inside the universe and titled "Claw Marks: The Onboard Magazine of TCS Tiger's Claw". Inside is various stories and articles that might be interesting to an active pilot, including a set of ship's schematics under the heading "Joan's Spacecraft". This is a various obvious nod to the Jane's Information Group which for years published encyclopedic specifications of ships, aircraft, tanks and other machines of war. In the video game world, the Jane's branding has been attached to multiple products.

Novels

There have been eight novels written and published set in the Wing Commander universe; unusually, most of them have been at least partially written by the same author, and hence for game novel adaptations can be considered to contain extraordinary degrees of internal continuity:

Packaging

There's a large blurb on the back of the original box that says "Every screenshot taken from this game - What You See is What You Play!" However, that's incorrect. Most of the shots on the back were taken from a beta version of the game, featuring weapons, names, and graphics not seen in the final version. Isn't it ironic?

PC Gamer release

A complete version of Wing Commander is available on Classic Games Collection CD featured in the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer Magazine.

Player character

In Wing Commander, the player character has no name and when he was created, his black hair was "highlighted" with lots of streaks of blue (there was a limited color palette). Within Origin, he came to be referred to as "BlueHair" when discussing him. It is possible that this was the basis when he was named "Blair" in later installments of the series.

References

If you look at the "weapons ratings" you will notice that some are rated in "ESK's". This stands for "Earth Shattering Kabooms!", as per the Marvin the Martian cartoon.

SEGA CD version

The Sega CD version of Wing Commander features voice acting for all the dialogue in the game. There are not even any subtitles.

Soundtrack

In 2002 Team Fat announced the release of a completely redone Soundtrack-CD. The bonus track of this CD - a surf-version of the WC-Theme - can be found at http://www.gamasutra.com/galleries/audio/george_sanger/index.htm

Technology

Unique for its time, Wing Commander used a hybrid 3D system that took place in true 3D space, but used bitmaps drawn from different angles for sprites. The end result was a 3D system that was fast without the speed penalty of rendering polygons in realtime (bitmap scaling and rotation was employed instead). A similar method was used in Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, but not until several years later.

Title

The game was originally going to be called Wingleader and had that name until very shortly before it was shipped. It was changed at the last minute when it was discovered a board game had the same name and they didn't want to risk trademark infringement. Some beta-test pictures can still be found which contain that name.

Awards

ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)

March 1991 (issue #42) - Included in the list Greatest Games of all Time in category Simulations (editorial staff choice)

Amiga Joker

Issue 02/1994 – Best Simulation in 1993 (Readers' Vote)

Computer Gaming World

November 1991 (Issue #88) – Game of the Year

April 1992 (Issue #93) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame

November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #7 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list

November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #10 Best Way To Die In Computer Gaming (receiving a funeral)

November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #12 Most Rewarding Ending of All Time

200th anniversary issue - #4 in the "Best Game of All Time" list (Readers' vote)

FLUX

Issue #4 - #20 in the "Top 100 Video Games of All-Time" list

GameSpy

2001 – #34 Top Game of All Time

GameStar (Germany)

Issue 12/1999 - #4 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking